Elizabeth Kostina at Aeon Magazine:
By 1997, Moscow’s skyline was transformed when a vast golden dome, long absent, rose once again over the city. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had returned. The dome-topped structure now standing along the Moskva River is a near-exact replica of the original 19th-century cathedral built to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1812. The cathedral was destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1931, then in 1958 it was replaced with a massive outdoor swimming pool, reusing the abandoned foundation of the Palace of the Soviets. My mother swam in this pool as a child in the early 1980s, basking in its steaming waters while snow fell around her and passersby. The absence of the cathedral above her was a testament to the Soviet state’s ‘ideological triumph’ over the past. Decades later, however, the pool was drained, the land consecrated once more, and the cathedral rebuilt, signalling changing times and ideologies. Today, walking past the cathedral, you’d be hard-pressed to find any mention of its former life as a swimming pool. Yet, as the Russian proverb goes, cвято место пусто не бывает – a sacred space is never empty.
more here.
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